Kelly McParland: Margaret Thatcher was the indispensable leader

Margaret Thatcher was the indispensable leader

To begin to appreciate the importance of Margaret Thatcher, it does well to keep a few facts in mind.

When Ontario recently chose a female premier for the first time, it was heralded as historically significant. Alberta, Quebec and B.C. all got around to similar breakthroughs only in the past decade. The U.S. still hasn’t managed a woman president; Canada as a country has had just one, unelected, for a brief period before she was defeated. All this 25 years or more after Britain chose the former Margaret Hilda Roberts to lead the Conservative party, and ultimately made her prime minister of a nuclear power that was then, and remains, among the world’s leading western nations.

But her gender triumph was perhaps her least significant accomplishment. At the time of her elevation, Britain was a country in near economic collapse, with a three-day work week, uncollected garbage piled in the streets, swaggering union bosses treating democracy as an inconvenient afterthought and a gnawing sense that the core of the country was in a state of irreversible decline.

Thatcher confronted Britain’s unions with a forthrightness no previous prime minister had dared.

And yet, she reversed it. Stubborn, bossy, domineering, to some even frightening, Thatcher seized a country that seemed intent on shambling off into irrelevance and dragged it back to a semblance of its previous self. It was not always a pretty process, and in the end Thatcher was ousted not by voters, but by her own party, despite having kept it in power with successive majorities for more than a decade.

“I like Mr. Gorbachev, we can do business together.”

It was a decade it would be hard to forget. Thatcher confronted Britain’s unions with a forthrightness no previous prime minister had dared. In an epic showdown that forever altered the national landscape, she took on the militant miners union headed by the odious Arthur Scargill, demanding an end to uneconomic labour practices that had long since ceased making sense, but which had been propped up out of fear of the alternative. Pits were closed, thousands of miners lost their jobs, whole communities lost their main industry, but the point was made that free enterprise, commercial sense and national progress would henceforth take precedent over featherbedding and bottomless subsidization.

When Argentina challenged British control over the Falkland Islands, she met the challenge with a similar sense of assurance and determination, which transformed her image. She was the Iron Lady, the war leader willing to send an army half-way around the world for the sake of a few hundred British dependents on a windy island few had even heard of, because the alternative might have left a stain on British honour. And she won.

She often won. She revived the economy, put people back to work, revived the national stature. Along with her friend and ally Ronald Reagan, she helped reverse the slow slide into debt and deficit as inevitable elements of national budgeting. She pressed for a revival of the sense that people carry responsibilities as well as needs, duties in addition to demands. The Irish Republican Army tried to assassinate her, and succeeded in killing or wounding some of those closest to her. But she was a lady “not for turning.” Opponents and critics became known as “wets”, a term that captured all the wishy-washyness of uncertain government that she despised. The Queen was said to be something less than a fan.

She could be heartless at times. During a particularly frigid winter, in a country that is always ill-prepared for cold, her government delayed emergency relief for those who could ill afford to heat their homes, eventually agreeing to a plan so complex and slow-moving that recipients could only expect to begin receiving relief cheques in the spring, once the winter was over. She miscalculated badly in 1990 in attempting to introduce a sweeping poll tax that sparked riots in Trafalgar Square. Her tone of smug self-assurance grated on many. After one election victory, she assured the country she intended to “go on and on”. She was seen by some as too enthusiastic about the United States, and insufficiently enthused about Europe. Given the current state of European economic affairs, her doubts would seem to have been eminently reasonable. She was similarly far-sighted when she recognize the significance of new leadership in Moscow, and declared she could “do business” with Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the end she alienated enough of her own party members, and roused enough plotters, to lose her job. But by then Britain was a different country. Stronger, more confident, better off. She may not have been loved, but she was indispensable.